But it should...
…come as no surprise that this born Yankee with a Southern accent sometimes does not quite know where she belongs. A couple months ago I was on the phone with my mama. I asked her where in the world she is happiest. She said, “Back home. Hanging out on the deck in Irvington, [Virginia], drinking Jack Daniels, and looking out onto the water.”
“And when you are at home in Missouri?” I asked. “Because you’re only ever in Irvington a couple weeks each year.”
“Sitting by the pool,” she said. “And drinking Jack Daniels.”
My mother has spent twenty-one years searching for water.
If you pull a rubber band tightly enough it will either break or spring back, popping into the air between your fingers. So too do I feel stretched sometimes between the one and the other, the y’all-drawlin’ ruffian running barefoot through land-locked Jasper County and her Eastern seaboard-obsessed twin.
When I moved to the city a new friend took me to my first Rangers game. I told his friends upon introduction, “Well, I was raised in Missouri, but I’m technically from Connecticut.”
“Don’t tell them that,” he said. “Missouri makes you different. Own it.”
That was six months ago, and still I beat on, my boat against the current. I run and I run and I run, and I live on an island, yet I can never seem to find any water.
